This is the first day of a four-day series of stories, photos, videos and interactives that examine the Cape Cod National Seashore as it turns 50 years old. The Times worked in conjunction with WCAI, the Cape and Islands NPR radio station, on the series.
EASTHAM – It's a low-key drive into the Cape Cod National Seashore – past the Eastham post office, antique shops and clam huts – and only then, once you've shopped for swimming tubes and snacks, only then might you notice a sign for the visitor center.
But that below-the-radar sense of the park belies the regional and national importance of its creation in 1961.
On the Cape, the Seashore legislation is the most important federal action of the 20th century, an early acknowledgement of the region as a national treasure, said Paul Niedzwiecki, executive director of the Cape Cod Commission, the regional land-use planning and regulatory agency created in 1990.
Nationally, the Seashore was even more innovative. It was the first urban national park, one that existed and thrived within a populated area of towns, businesses and residences.
Before 1961, only Cape Hatteras National Seashore in North Carolina existed, created in 1953.
At the time, the Northeast was booming and one-third of the country's population, 25 million people, lived within a day's drive of the Cape. At the signing of the Seashore bill on Aug. 7, 1961, President John F. Kennedy predicted a doubling of the country's population in the coming 50 years, and of the need for more places for recreation, particularly near highly developed urban areas.
The original Seashore legislation encompassed 26,670 acres in the six easternmost towns of Cape Cod, including 53 miles of beaches, 8 square miles of sand dunes, 20 freshwater lakes and several historic sites.

Audio Seashore stories from WCAI radio

WCAI's Sean Corcoran reports that, after 50 years of existence, the National Seashore has been successful at balancing environmental protection with recreation.

“There was a significant population on the Outer Cape and it was settled, it was developed, it was functioning,” said Jonathan Moore, legislative aide to U.S. Sen. Leverett Saltonstall, who co-sponsored the Seashore bill with then-Senator Kennedy in 1959. “It was not a wild area. So there was a big discussion.”
At the time, the U.S. Department of Interior wanted to protect the region's scenic beauty, its scientific and cultural value, its undeveloped areas and the distinctive Cape Cod character of the existing homes. The break-through with the Seashore legislation was a set of zoning standards that gave the Department of Interior a say in private property development within the park's boundaries, via bylaws that the six towns had to adopt.
“The Secretary of the Interior could now condemn private property if a property owner violated a zoning ordinance or if a town improperly granted a zoning variance,” said Oliver Spellman of the National Parks Conservation Association, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit that advocates for national parks and the National Park Service.
The Seashore zoning formula, however, allowed for other national seashores and national parks to be developed, starting in 1962 with Padre Island National Seashore in Texas and Point Reyes National Seashore in California.
“It was precedent setting. It's still pretty incredible,” Spellman said.

Specifically, the Seashore zoning standards protected private properties within the park boundaries as long as they existed as of Sept. 1, 1959, and as long as the house and land had the same owner, said Lauren McKean, the Seashore's current planner. As long as these types of properties were redeveloped according to the town's zoning bylaws, they were exempt from condemnation by the federal government.
The standards also required towns to enact additional zoning laws or leave private property in that town open to possible condemnation. This included establishing a separate Seashore zoning district and adopting minimum standards for those districts, such as 3-acre minimum lot sizes. Between 1963 and 1966, all six towns enacted those standards, McKean said.
“That was the breakthrough,” Moore said.
But the growing demand for larger homes on Cape Cod has challenged federal officials. In the 1980s, federal guidelines for the Seashore further limited residential expansion, but only Eastham adopted them as law, said Seashore Supt. George Price. In 2008 the federal government unsuccessfully sued a property owner in Wellfleet over the size of a reconstructed house within the Seashore boundaries.
Following that, the town of Wellfleet did adopt new house size limits in the Seashore, but so far Truro has not followed suit, Price said.

Jonathan Moore, who was legislative assistant to U.S. Sen. Leverett Saltonstall, who co-sponsored the Seashore bill with then-Senator Kennedy in 1959, in a photo at Nauset Beach.

(Cape Cod Times/Christine Hochkeppel)

Today, about 590 private properties exist within the Seashore's boundaries: 251 in Wellfleet, 211 in Truro, 105 in Eastham, 20 in Chatham, one in Orleans and one in Provincetown, according to Seashore records.
From a regional perspective, the Seashore legislation was the first of a handful of laws that have set in motion efforts to preserve “the Cape for what it is,” Niedzwiecki said.
After the Seashore bill came state and federal efforts starting in the late 1970s to clean-up pollution from military sites at the Massachusetts Military Reservation. And, passage of the Cape Cod Commission Act in 1989, created a region-wide mechanism to control property development.
The creation of the Seashore also led to the expansion of the Cape's tourism economy, worth $2.5 billion in 2009 figures, about a third of the Cape's economy, according to commission records.
“The Seashore is what started it all,” Niedzwiecki said.